Where the Nurses are Pretty and the Doctors are Pissed

John Whiteside Parsons (born Marvel Whiteside Parsons 1914 – 1952), better known as Jack Parsons, was an American rocket propulsion researcher at the California Institute of Technology.He married Helen Northrup in April 1935.

“He was an acolyte of Aleister Crowley, an employee of Howard Hughes and a victim of L. Ron Hubbard. Though obscured by wild rumor and sinister presumptions, Parsons’ reputation has survived among devotees of rockets and of magic. His relationship with his mother was intense and possibly incestuous. He has been described as good looking and promiscuous, working his way through the secretarial pool at Aerojet.

Along with his more scientific pursuits, he also tried to create a “Moon Child,” a magic being conjured via mystic ritual who would usher in a new age of unfettered liberty and signal the end of the Christian era and its outmoded morality.

Parsons had no formal education beyond high school. Yet his deep knowledge of explosives, formed through early issues of Amazing Stories and stints with explosive powder companies, earned him a leading role in a small gang performing rocketry experiments at and around Caltech in the ’30s. In those days, rocket science was the province mostly of twisted dreamers, not serious scientists. His gang was not-so-affectionately dubbed the Suicide Squad for the series of alarming explosions they caused on campus. Eventually they were exiled to the Arroyo Seco canyon to conduct experiments in discovering stable, usable rocket fuels. (They discovered plenty of unstable, unusable ones along the way.)

Then World War II changed things. The U.S. military called upon these smoke-streaked stepchildren of Caltech, hoping to use their crazy rocket gadgets to propel planes into the air in places without adequate runways. Gradually the gang of misfits evolved into the Jet Propulsion Laboratories. Parsons designed new rocket fuel after rocket fuel, and eventually they succeeded in inventing jet-assisted take-off.

While inventing the castable rocket fuel that made the space age possible, Parsons simultaneously explored the frontiers of inner space, building the other half of his weird reputation. He became enraptured with the writings of the British occultist Aleister Crowley and joined the L.A.-based Agape Lodge of Crowley’s Ordo Templi Orientis. Crowley’s American lieutenants seized on the charismatic and successful scientist as a potential savior for their movement; he began donating almost all his salary to the upkeep of his lodge brethren.

Eighteen year old Sarah Northrup began living with Parsons and Parsons’ wife, Sara’s half-sister Helen Northrup; later, Parsons and Sara became involved in an affair, which caused strife with Helen and eventually led to Helen leaving with another Lodge member, Wilfred Smith, who also had a reputation as a legendary womaniser.

After the war Parson’s occult activism attracted the young L. Ron Hubbard into his life and home. The pulp writer, pre-Dianetics, took off for Florida with Jack’s mistress, Sarah Northrup, and most of his money, supposedly to buy boats to bring to California and launch a business operation they’d jointly own. Hubbard never came back. The official Scientology line –unsupported by any evidence–is that Hubbard was sent by Naval Intelligence to break up Parsons’ evil occult sex ring.

During his last days Parsons was reduced to working for Hollywood movies, making tiny explosive squibs that mimicked a man being shot. This from someone who once dreamed of blasting man into outer space. Some people regard the 1952 explosion that killed him in his Pasadena backyard lab as mysterious. One close pal, though, didn’t see much of a puzzle. He noted that “Jack used to sweat a lot and [a coffee can in which he was mixing explosives] just slipped out of his hand and blew him up.”

A crater on the dark side of the Moon has been named after Parsons. His last girlfriend, Marjorie “Candida” Cameron went on to become a successful painter and actress in avant-garde films. She is sometimes cited as the inspiration behind the Eagles song “Hotel California”

I don’t know that I’d describe being blown up as sad for someone with an ‘interesting’ life like his- I’d think for an occultist self taught rocket scientist with a backyard lab, being blown up was about what you’d expect!

I remember Colin Wilson’s account of this in his book *The Occult,* and Crowley’s remark that “someone or other is supposedly trying to create a Moonchild. One becomes fairly frantic when contemplating the follies of these idiots,” or words close to that. Apparently he didn’t think too much of his American devotees and their earnest acceptance of his novel *Moonchild.* (It’s on my shelf somewhere — a terrific bore.)

Is this a recent memoir? I’ve read so much of his stuff, which is interlaced with reminiscence, I’m not sure. Must go look. I used to think the world of him before he kind of descended into “if it’s purportedly supernatural I’ll write credulously about it” hell — a place he derided as a young writer.

Those were the days, when loopy amateurs pottered round laboratories creating rocket fuel and almost blowing themselves up. I suppose today’s scientists are more professional but they’re also a lot less exciting or glamorous.

Northrup…? Is it just coincidence that a major US space/defence/aerospace corporation is called Northrop Grumman? Being intimately involved with the family that founded that organisation would certainly not have harmed his career.

I grew up with Amazing Stories and I also played with “stinks and bangs” as a teenager. Then I discovered girls and I dropped the first two interests. Maybe that was just as well – although girls are so much more complicated than “stinks and bangs” 🙂

An amazing story. There was an article about Parsons in Fortean Times back in 2000. The writer said: “If Parsons’ vital energies were confused, anachronistic, and hypocritical, he nevertheless represents (and indeed so does Ron Hubbard, his partner in magical rituals), that seething undertow of light-and-dark contrast in American life which is connected in some vital formative sense with the prototype aircraft that barrel down American runways.” (http://www.forteantimes.com/features/profiles/507/john_whiteside_parsons.html)
So there you go: Satanist sex fiend scientists represent something vital to America.

People have claimed that eliptony from the Black Dahlia to the Roswell crash, as well as his own immolation, were a product of this ritual. Crowley expressed dismay over the working: “Apparently Parsons and Hubbard or somebody is producing a moonchild. I get fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these louts.”